Leading Financial Organization Creates Virtual Mainframe & Reduces Testing Costs

The Challenge

A leading financial services institution needed a stable, “always-on” test environment that business partners could develop and test against in order to obtain certification. Since the test environment involves mainframes that are costly to scale, the same environment was being used by internal dev/test teams as well as partners. This resulted in scheduling conflicts, configuration hassles, and downtime that delayed the onboarding of new partners. Recently, the business was increasing the speed and scope of partner recruitment, but the onboarding process could not keep pace due to test environment constraints.

Before a new partner is allowed to work with the organization, they must successfully integrate their own application into the organization’s system. Achieving the required partner certification requires testing against the organization’s partner portal, which, due to cost constraints, was also being used by the organization’s internal development and QA teams. This resulted in scheduling constraints which often led to testing delays both internally and externally.

Another source of delays: after one team was done using the environment, the next team needed to spend considerable time “cleaning it up” (resetting data) before they could begin their own environment configuration.

Moreover, since the internal teams use this environment to deploy and test application modifications, it’s not uncommon for it to be inaccessible as the associated services are updated. Although a 6 hour test environment downtime from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. PST might not have considerable impact for many organizations, it could prevent a new partner in Russia from developing and testing against the system for what might be the bulk of their business day.

No matter when an update occurs, it’s bound to impact some of the many global partners working to attain certification. Establishing a secondary test environment exclusively for partners would be cost-prohibitive because it involves mainframes, which are very expensive to replicate and scale for testing purposes.

The Approach

Parasoft’s service virtualization solution allows the organization to emulate 100% of the mainframe behavior that partners need to access for development, test, and certification purposes—giving them a cost-effective way to provide a stable, “always-on” environment for partner integration.

The organization captures mainframe functionality by having Parasoft Virtualize “sit on the wire” and record requests and the correlated responses (SOAP over HTTPS and XML over HTTPS). With this core behavior emulated by a virtual asset, the organization can grant a new partner access to the necessary environment in a matter of minutes. They simply need to modify an Excel file so that the virtual asset accepts a new range of data (assigned to each partner).

Parasoft’s service virtualization solution enables the organization to onboard partners more efficiently—and without impeding their internal dev/test operations. Parasoft Virtualize is used to capture 100% of the mainframe behavior that partners need to interact with, and the organization can grant a new partner access to this behavior in a matter of minutes.

The Results

Now, the organization’s internal team can deploy and test new functionality without worrying about disrupting partners. Partners never need to interact with the actual mainframes. All the behavior they need to access is provided by the virtual assets, which are available 24/7.